"Human touch is typically understood as a proximal sense, limited to what we physically touch.

However, recent findings in animal sensory systems have challenged this view.

Certain shorebirds, such as sandpipers and plovers, use a form of remote touch to detect prey hidden beneath the sand.

Remote touch allows the detection of objects buried under granular materials through subtle mechanical cues transmitted through the medium, when a moving pressure is applied nearby.

In the new research, Dr. Elisabetta Versace from Queen Mary University of London and her colleagues investigated whether humans share a similar capability.

The participants moved their fingers gently through sand to locate a hidden cube before physically touching it.

Remarkably, the results revealed a comparable ability to that seen in shorebirds, despite humans lacking the specialized beak structures that enable this sense in birds.

By modeling the physical aspects of the phenomenon, the researchers found that human hands are remarkably sensitive, detecting the presence of buried objects by perceiving minute displacements in the sand surrounding them.

This sensitivity approaches the theoretical physical threshold of what can be detected from mechanical ‘reflections’ in granular material, when there is a sand movement that is ‘reflected’ on a stable surface (the hidden object)."

"“It’s the first time that remote touch has been studied in humans and it changes our conception of the perceptual world (what is called the ‘receptive field’) in living beings, including humans,” Dr. Versace said."

(The findings were presented in September at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) in Prague, Czech Republic.)